Photobombed by Heavenly Father and the Savior…talk about a memorable baptism!

Awesome week this week! Two of my investigators from LuZhou got baptized yesterday! One was a girl whose father is a member but she wasn’t yet – her father wanted her to choose for herself to be baptized. The other was Yang Ming Lun (Kevin/Yummy – apparently his co-workers call him Yummy).

Elder King, Yang Tian An, Yang Yu Shan, Elder Anderton, and Elder Simonson

The girl, Yang Yu Shan, was baptized by her father, but Yang Ming Lun was baptized by…….me! Last week, I was super excited to hear that he wanted me to help him get baptized!

Yummy with Elders Simonson and Chia

I had to memorize the words for baptizing someone in Chinese, but fortunately it’s not terribly difficult; I memorized it in about 5-10 minutes, and then kept going over it throughout the day for the few days up until the baptism so that I wouldn’t forget it on the spot. Since their ward meets in the morning, I was able to stay for Sacrament meeting and not only see Yang Yu Shan’s confirmation, but participate in it as well!

Seeing your middle school friend in Taiwan…priceless!

From there we headed straight to the English ward since we have native English speakers that we teach as well – there are a lot of them in our area since we have multiple international schools. We’ve lots of amazing people that we know, like Lucy and Taylor, who go to this school called Taipei American School (TAS)! After English ward though, I had an unexpected surprise; my friend, Jake Tennant, who I went to 6th grade with (and also seminary – but he was in 0-period seminary so I never saw him) was also there visiting his sister! My companion and I will be hanging out with him today probably over by Taipei 101 since he’s leaving Taiwan this week.

Also, I am the proud new owner of a Taiwan Costco card! Last Monday, we needed to go to Costco to buy lots of food for the ward activity on Saturday that we were planning, but there were no members that had Costco cards that could go with us! We really needed to buy food there, so I ended up just purchasing a new card. It’s good for an entire year so I think it’s definitely worth it!

Since I’m finally old enough to vote (and of course want to do my duty as a citizen of the US!), I registered to vote outside of the country and received my ballot a couple weeks ago! This last week I was able to fill it out and drop it in the mail…hopefully it gets back to the US in time!

1st time voting for the young Republican

This last week went really well and was super fun! We’re hoping to keep up the good work and have lots of success. This next week we’ll specifically be working on getting our baptismal date investigators to progress and really understand the different parts of the gospel. They’re all awesome and we look forward to meeting with them each time as well as finding new, awesome people to teach!
– Elder Austin Simonson
文長老

Finally…Anderton isn’t the tallest (looks like the Savior got some help with the photobombing)!